


Magnum Opus

by Sub_Rosa



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Female Protagonist, Gen, Immortality, Lesbian Character, Magic, Magic-Users, Martial Arts, Multi, Regular Updates Not Guaranteed, Spiritual, Strong Female Characters, Trans Female Character, Transhumanism, Western Esotericism, Wuxia, Xianxia, Xianxia Pastiche, cultivation, raging against the heavens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 20:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16502588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa
Summary: Plucky young Ava never wanted or expected much from life—but when her sister's secrets put both their lives at risk, she finds herself drawn into the tutelage and affairs of a cult of magicians pursuing immortality.Now, in a world ruled by the will to power and equally inhabited by fantasies and nightmares, Ava is faced with the greatest challenge of her life: not just surviving and growing strong, but living and thriving as she becomes someone more powerful than she ever dreamed she could be.





	1. Family Matters

**Author's Note:**

> This is chiefly inspired by the 'xianxia' genre as popularized in Chinese web fiction, although close familiarity with the 'source material' shouldn't be required to understand this story—this certainly isn't meant to be a typical example of the genre.
> 
> I wasn't planning to crosspost this story until I had written many more chapters, but recent developments with my intended primary hosting site for this story have caused me to question those choices. Ao3 will be the primary host for this story for the forseeable future.
> 
> This is a *major* work-in-progress, obviously. We'll see how it goes from here.

_The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will._

-Elphias Levi

 

* * *

 

It was a bright and cheery morning in Luclua Province when Ava died.

Strictly speaking, Luclua Province was one of the least prosperous regions in a distinctly less prosperous kingdom; hardly the best place for any youth to live. But to Ava, it was her home, with everything that implied. Like a well-worn shoe of cheap leather, scrappy and broken in, she had made her life into a place for herself. Almost every morning, she woke up and thought: _I’m glad to be alive and awake. I’m glad to be able to experience this. I am glad_.

Almost every morning, but not this one.

“Pleaaaase let me go back to sleep,” Ava said, slurring her words through the fog of dreams. “I’m too tired to stay awake.”

“But we’re _hungry_ ,” Eve said resolutely. The little girl was sitting on top of Ava’s chest, on top of her thin blankets, weighing her down. Ava couldn’t have gotten up even if she wanted to, ironically enough; Eve wasn’t helping her own cause.

“I may be hungry,” Ava said. “But I’m sleepy as shit, and I can wait.”

“But _I’m_ a growing girl,” Eve said.

“You don’t look like it, shortstack,” Ava said grumpily. But she had already lost; there were some arguments that she could never win to begin with. “What time is it?”

“I dunno,” Eve said. She and Ava were holed up - squatting, really - in the basement of an abandoned house, far away from windows and sunlight.

“And you didn’t want to figure it out, huh?”

Eve pouted.

“Alright, kid,” Ava said. “Let’s get some food in our bellies.”

She pushed Eve off of herself and began to run her hands over the other girl’s face, rubbing grime and dirt from sun-kissed cheeks and combing knots out of tattered auburn hair. The two girls were almost mirror images of each other, beaten into shape on the same streets, only separated by age; and so it came down to Eve, to- “Do me now, kid.”

Eve looked up, squinting like she was staring into the sun for all that the two of them were in the dark. Then her clumsy hands grabbed Ava’s cheeks, pinched Ava’s cheeks like an old woman playing with her grandchild. She tried to comb through Ava’s hair and ended up ruffling it instead.

“Done!” Eve said, absolutely pleased with herself.

“Thanks, shortstack,” Ava replied. A smile played at the corner of her lips, and she stood up to go.

She was halfway up the basement stairs by the time she realized that Eve wasn’t following after her.

“Are you coming or what?”

“I don’t want to go,” Eve said. “I like it down here. It’s cozy.”

“Sure, but there isn’t anything to eat down here, dumbass. Isn’t that why you woke me up?”

“I woke you up to get me food,” Eve said.

“You little shit,” Ava said, and she laughed. “Come on, I’m not gonna leave you down here without me.”

Eve sat still, and turned away.

“Eve?”

Still, Eve said nothing.

“Eve, come on, talk to me here.”

“I don’t wanna leave right now,” Eve said quietly. And Eve was _never_ quiet, not really. “I don’t want to go.”

“We can’t _stay still_ ,” Ava said. But her heart wasn’t in it.

There were some arguments that she could never win to begin with.

“Alright. I’ll be right back.”

* * *

Getting food on the streets was an exercise in patience; it was an exercise in frustration, in not knowing when to quit. It was an exercise in opportunism, in waiting for the right moment, in hoping that the right moment would come before you starved to death. It was an exercise in not letting anyone else get their food from you. There was garbage to rifle through, and there were travellers to steal from, and sympathies to play on, and bigger, stronger drifters to avoid.

Living on the streets meant _literally_ living in the gaps, but that was okay. Lots of things grew and thrived in gaps and cracks. People expected Ava to be miserable— _waaah, look at the poor little orphan!—_ but really, she wasn’t. She _hated_ the expectation that she was supposed to be miserable. She _loathed_ it. Once some rich merchant travelling through her province had tried to give her some food for charity, and maybe she would have accepted with grace if not for the most pitiful look on his face. So she had refused the food, decked him in the face, and run away rather than swallow her pride and drink his soup.

It seemed straightforward to her. She could be happy, or she could be miserable—and why in the world would she hand that choice off to anyone else? It was her choice to be happy or miserable, and of course she was going to choose to be happy with her lot in life. She always wanted more, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her from feeling like she was already on top of the world; if people would always see her as inhuman gutter trash, at least she was gonna be _content_ gutter trash.

That was, essentially, her first sin.

Her second sin—the sin that she actually cared about—was that she expected other people to be able to make the same choice as her.

Suffice to say, Ava was pretty morose as she made her way through the outskirts of Norburn.

She chewed her way through the last of one of her many pilfered bread crusts (stale, but that just added texture). And like a monkey, she clambered up and onto one of the many brick walls at the edge of her city. They hadn’t formed a complete barrier in years—not since before she was born, if adults and strangers could be believed. But the walls weren’t meant to keep mere _people_ in or out. The walls were meant for other things; the kinds of creatures who could be barred from an open window merely by the blood smeared across the lintel of the front door.

Rather than jump over, Ava lay down atop the crown of the wall, looking up to watch the clouds. It was a warm midsummer day, not too hot or too cold; a powerful south wind was blowing through the forest and dusting the air.

“Eve, what am I going to do with you…?”

She sighed, letting some of the tension bleed out of her body through her mouth.

She and Eve _looked_ like sisters by blood, but they were anything but; they had met by happenstance, and that was enough for the two of them. They were sisters in that they were both gutter trash garbage girls falling between the cracks and growing between the cracks. Even though Ava wanted to take care of Eve, she was nothing like her older sister.

Eve wanted a home so badly that it was making her sick.

“How am _I_ supposed to give you a home?” Ava asked herself rhetorically. Putting her thoughts out there made them more tangible, easier to grapple with. “We can’t just keep _squatting_. Why do you have to have such high standards? Why are your standards contagious, you little brat?”

Eve didn’t respond, of course, because she wasn’t there.

These problems had been gnawing at her for some time, but they were becoming more and more tangible. Her life was lovely and great… except when it wasn’t. Like when 'her life' was also supposed to provide for other people. Then her life _really_ wasn’t great.

But it was hard for her to see a path she could take to prop her life up. What was she supposed to do, become a farmer? That sounded comfortably domestic and down-to-earth, but it wasn’t like she could pull the appropriate tools and a few acres of arable land out of her ass. Craftsmanship? Who would take someone like _her_ as an apprentice?

She allowed herself to wallow for a few moments, closing her eyes to think.

“No! I can’t count myself out before it’s even over!” Ava steeled herself. “My life is supposed to be hard, but I’m living it just fine! So I won’t stop looking for a way to do what I need to do, even if it will make my life harder. If my life is going to have to get harder, I’ll live through that, too!”

So decided, she sat up on the wall, facing away from the city and towards the woods and plains. There was a soft, sweet smell of honeysuckle in the air, tickling at her nose.

She jumped down to the ground beyond the city limits, where the grass always grew just a little bit taller and wider and _wilder_ ; a place just a few inches further removed from the reach and authority of civilization. It was a somewhat dangerous place—if adults and strangers could be believed—and she knew from experience that the low-hanging fruit out there was almost always poisonous or bitter. But there were beautiful things out there, too.

She followed her nose, tracking the scent of the sweet flowers down to a tree a few hundred feet away beyond the edge of town, growing on a hillside and covered in encroaching honeysuckle vines. They peeled away easily, breaking off into her hands and leaving her with a handful and a tangle of flowers.

Idly, she sat down on the slope of the hill, and began to try and rearrange the plants into a more orderly shape. It was really a beautiful day; she wished she could have convinced Eve to come along.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” said a voice from right behind her neck.

Ava screamed out loud _,_ and her entire body violently jerked up and away; she dropped the flowers to the ground, and a few bread crusts spilled out of her pockets. When she whirled to face the speaker, she already had one leg raised for a vicious kick, but what she saw shocked her into standing still!

A tall and handsome man was standing before her now, fair-skinned and fair-haired, dressed in well-kept black robes.

He was someone wearing the garb of a magician!


	2. The Magicians

Ava’s mind went blank, overwhelmed by the surprise and shock flooding her body. What was a magician doing here, wasting time talking to her? It was akin to something from a storybook!

Now, in fairness to her, it wasn’t as if she had never met a magician before.

Growing up—first with her parents, then on the streets—she had always heard fairy stories about magicians and their powers. Tall tales and bedtime stories suggesting that magicians could fly, turn their enemies to ashes, raise and sink continents, and live forever!

That was, of course, all complete bullshit, as far as she was concerned.

Ava had seen magicians and seen what they could do, and for the most part, it was nothing special. It was nothing more than pushing luck around. Or when it wasn’t luck, it was intangible; magicians could always hedge spirits out and extend the reach of civilization, but what was that? The triumph of the mundane over the fantastic?

Safe, but boring. Magic was just _boring_.

And yet, there was something about this man before her that made him seem anything but.

 _Ava you_ idiot _what are you doing!? At least dignify the mysterious powerful magic man with a response._ “I—yes, sir, today is very beautiful.”

The man smiled, drawing himself in closer to her. Up close and personal, she could see that he had blue eyes.

He kneeled down to pick up her honeysuckle, passing it back off to her, and up close and personal, he only seemed more impossibly mythical. Larger-than-life and absolutely magnetic, looming over her until he took up all of her attention as well as all of her sunlight. He was so much taller than her, and somehow ageless; he could have been just as old as her, or he could have been thirty.

“What brings a young woman like you to the countryside?” the man asked. He was smiling, and his teeth were white and straight like no-one Ava had ever seen before.

“Um,” Ava said, quite eloquently. “I just wanted to smell the flowers, sir.”

“Yes, they are quite lovely.” The man hummed under his breath, plucked one of Ava’s flowers from the bundle he had just given back to her, and took a long, slow _sniff_. “Not very useful though, are they?” he asked derisively. “Barely even magical.”

Ava blushed and looked down. Were the flowers really so terrible? “Well, sir, I wasn’t interested in them for their… magical… properties. I just thought they smelled nice.”

“Perhaps,” he drawled. He settled an easy hand on one of Ava’s shoulders, and then laughed. “You know, I always thought you would be taller when you grew up.”

“What?”

The man had already seemed terribly immense; but with his attention on her, with his hand on her, his weight was just as imposing as it was awe-inspiring. His fingers dug into her shitty shirt.

“Sir, I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“You don’t even recognize me,” he murmured.

“Sir, I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“Well that’s funny,” he said. But by the tone of his voice, he didn’t think it was very funny at all. “After all, you were the one who tried to kill me, Eve.”

All of the whimsy and wonder instantly drained out of Ava’s body, pooling in her guts, leaking out to spill across the ground; in a moment, everything magical about the magician became as terrifying as it actually was. He was larger than life, and that made him overwhelming enough to pull her in and swallow her alive. His every honeyed and duplicitous word might have been a murderous incantation.

“Ah.” The man grinned smugly, watching panic dance through her eyes. “There’s the recognition I was looking for. Imagine how _I_ felt, coming here on business and running into you?”

If she was who he thought she was, she would probably have given up, she was so scared. Everyone ‘knew’ that a magician could see right through a mere mortal like her. But he _didn’t_ know. He thought she was someone that she wasn’t, and that meant he was at least fallible on some level.

On some level.

 _Eve, what did you_ do?

“I’m sorry,” Ava croaked out carefully. “Please, I know I hurt you, but please don’t hurt me-”

“Hah!” The man laughed. “That’s hilarious.”

Then he _blurred_ , moving faster than she could even see; his hand clasped itself around her throat, and he pushed her back up against the tree, all draped in honeysuckle. Flowers brushed against her cheek.

She pulled her leg up and kneed him in the balls, but she might as well have been trying to kick through a slab of rock. His hand tightened oh-so-slightly around her neck.

“You little monster,” he hissed.

She struggled to speak, almost completely unable to breathe. Tears were welling up in her eyes. “Please. I’m- sorry-”

“I should just kill you right now, revenge aside.”

His eyes were full of nothing but hatred for her, hatred for _Eve_. Would he forget about Eve if he killed her here? That seemed rather too much to hope for. He had already found Ava just by chance, why mightn’t he run into her sister, too?

“I’ll do- anything-” she gasped. _Please, just let me live, I can do something about you if I live, I don’t want to die, life is all I have_.

He sneered viciously, and her vision was slowly going dark. Bright lines crackled and broke through her field of view before she closed her eyes.

Sharp _cracking_ noises erupted in her ears, and for a moment she thought her bones were shattering.

“Terrick,” a cold voice spoke out, cutting through the fog of oxygen deprivation like a knife to the brain. “I rather hope you’re not wasting our time just to have an… intimate moment.”

The magician let go of Ava’s throat, and she collapsed to the ground, gasping and wheezing. She couldn't see through the ache in her throat. She could barely hear through the din in her head.

“You-!” the magician hissed. “This is none of your business, Hohen.”

“Of course,” the cold voice said plainly, not even threatening. “If you derelict your duties outside of our order, it’s entirely your business if you face consequences for that.”

Ava managed to crack her eyes open properly, looking up to see the confrontation.

The magician who had just choked Ava—Terrick—had loomed over her, but now this ‘Hohen’ loomed over Terrick, looking down on him with aristocratic features. And Hohen wasn’t looming over Terrick because he was the taller man.

No, Hohen was just _flying_ , hovering in midair. Like Terrick, he wore a tau-cut robe, but his grey garb was cut again so as to expose his fine pants and boots.

And even through Ava’s head was still spinning, only finally beginning to settle, she immediately understood: if Terrick could have killed her in seconds, Hohen could kill her in an instant. This was a magician straight out of legends—and as if to punctuate, Hohen snapped his fingers, and a pleasant numbness spread through her throat, washing away the last of the pain. It was still reedy and difficult to breathe, but she could think straight.

“You don’t want to start this fight, Hohen,” Terrick hissed. “You lean on your old blood, but you and I both know you don’t measure up. You’re a walking gimmick.”

Hohen stared down at Terrick, down at Ava. His glare was utterly dispassionate, utterly calculating. She silently pled with him, _do something, anything_ …

“Why would I start a fight?” he finally asked. “Surely I misjudged my fellow student. Forgive my insinuations; I know you would never waste our time on irrelevant, sleeping mortals. I can hardly fault your recruitment strategy, no matter how unorthodox it may be.”

He waved one hand through the air, and the air cracked again; pulling away and aside as if he was pushing his fingers through a sheet of glass, or drawing apart a curtain thrown over the surface of the world.

Terrick glared daggers at Hohen, before finally reaching down and yanking Ava up by her arm. “Let’s go,” he said with a snarl.

“Wait,” Ava tried to say. It came out thin but clear.

“What for?” Terrick growled. He obviously had to _physically force_ the words out. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime, for someone of your clear… _magical potential_.”

Dread settled in Ava’s stomach. She wanted to ask— _what about Eve?—_ except that she couldn’t ask. If Ava admitted to Terrick that she wasn’t Eve, that would put Eve in even more danger than leaving her behind would.

“I,” Ava whispered. _God damn it, Eve, you shitty brat, what did you DO to this guy!? I’m going to kill you myself when this is over-!_

Hohen flicked his hand, drawing the airy curtain of glass across the three of them. The world exploded into a kaleidoscopic labyrinth of reflections, lake-surfaces and polished metal all twisted around itself into a jagged dreamscape, a broken mirror poured over the real world.

There were even more people waiting there, on the other side of the curtain; men and women, girls and boys, almost universally dressed in finery, or at least the well-made garb of those who weren’t starving and stealing.

“Oy!” one of them yelled. “What’s the holdup, boys?”

“Just business as usual,” Hohen said. “Terrick was convincing her to join us.”

All eyes settled on Ava, and she curled up under the attention.

“Were there any more sensitives in this town?” Hohen asked Terrick.

“...no. Just the brat.”

“Then draw your blade, and we’ll be off, then.”

Terrick gritted his teeth, and he drew a silvery shortsword from somewhere within the drapes of his sleeves.

“Before me, Borealis; behind me, Notus!” As Terrick chanted, a powerful wind began to blow about them, strong enough to knock Ava down to the ground; down to whatever passed for the ground in this place. “At my right hand, Eurus; at my left hand, Zephyrus!”

The wind grew stronger now, strong enough to lift Ava off of her feet and into the air; strong enough to lift _everyone_ into the air, drifting like dust specks. Only Hohen was unruffled, standing tall in the storm under his own power. And then the countryside—such as it was, broken up by reflections—was gone, and the lot of them were blown into the sky. The world, already twisted and reflected, was drawn out by their speed and dissolved into a hypnagogic delirium.

They must have traveled like that for hours. An entire day and then more, two or three days.

Ava wanted to stay awake and alert in the face of the impossible, inscrutable men who now held her life in their hands, but the shock and violence was catching up to her. She felt like she was falling even as she was flying. She found herself dozing and blanking out, buffeted by winds like choking blankets.

Every once in a while, they would set back down on the earth, just long enough for Hohen and Terrick to duck out of the mirror-curtain and into reality again, bringing yet more people into their party. Or they would set back down on the earth, just long enough for the magicians to feed the mere mortals they were accumulating like dirt on their soles. Terrick gave them all water to drink from a peculiar goblet, but he never let Ava have very much of it.

When Hohen finally released them all back into the normal world, Ava was just one girl in a crowd of dozens, disgorged along with everybody else onto a vast and elevated pavilion, surrounded by shrubland. A nearby set of stairs led down to a path, forking in several directions, and one part of the path led to an impossibly-tall and finely-wrought stone building. She had seen functional two-story buildings before, but this seemed closer to three or four stories, if anything.

Another magician was waiting there for them, dressed in the same robes as the other two.

“Terrick,” she said. “You’re late for our training.”

“Apologies, Rielle.” Terrick smoothly went down on one knee, dipping into a bow. “I was given explicit instructions by our superiors.”

“ _I_ am your superior,” Rielle said. “Come along with me.”

Terrick rose up and began to follow after her.

“Our task isn’t done,” Hohen said loudly, his voice carrying across the platform. Terrick craned his head back to grin nastily at him, but Rielle didn’t even stop walking.

“Take them to the student’s lodge,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t need us to hold your hands.”

 _Student’s lodge._ The thought of it was everything Ava could have hoped for and everything she could have feared. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

If Hohen had arrived only a few seconds later, she would have died. But instead she had been roped up into _this_. Training and tutelage for magicians. Magicians out of myth and fantasy! To think she had been worried about where she might find someone to teach her _craftsmanship!_

She had barely dodged death and now she had a chance to study something real and powerful, whatever that might look like. She didn’t even know if she _could_ learn magic; but she wouldn’t count herself out without trying.

“Come along, then,” Hohen said, scowling coldly. The crowd of students—her included—began to follow after him, but Ava turned her head to watch Terrick go.

He thought that she was Eve. He wanted Eve dead. He was murderous and cruel.

Even if Ava found some way to leave this place and go home, Terrick would probably find an opportunity to come after her again… assuming that he hadn’t just killed her already. No, this was something that she couldn’t simply run away from.

Right then and there, Ava made a silent promise to Eve and a promise to herself. She was going to survive this place and endure this place, because the alternative was unbearable. She was going to learn magic, and become more powerful than even Terrick was, so that he could never terrorize her again. She was going to escape and find Eve again, and then she would never let her go, because she wasn’t going to lose her.

One of Ava’s hands went up to touch the bruises around her neck.

Right then and there, Ava decided: _right now, I don’t exist; I might as well already be dead. Right now, I’m not ‘Ava’—I’m ‘Eve’._

And before Terrick could kill her, _she_ was going to kill _him_.


End file.
